Linda Hutchison is reflected in a photograph of her son, Joseph David Hutchison, when he was 3 years old. She said Joe suffered from mental illness all his life.

Joe's long way home -

The body, covered by a white sheet and bathed in the stark beam of a police officer's
flashlight, looked forlorn and out of place on the cold, dark highway.

An unidentified pedestrian had been hit and killed when he ran into traffic on I-270 at
Georgesville Road.

A sense of foreboding chilled Linda Hutchison as she watched the 11 o'clock news that January
night a year ago. The accident had happened less than a mile from her home. She feared it was her
missing son, Joe -- brilliant and funny, mentally ill and troubled.

Two minutes later, she heard a knock on the door. Two somber officers delivered the news: Joe
was dead.

"I had tried to prepare for this day all of his life," she would write later. "Now that it was
here, I wanted to scream, 'No, not yet, not now! I'm not ready! It's too soon!' "

Joseph David Hutchison struggled through life with untreated mental illness. Trouble began in
preschool. He didn't fit in and couldn't make friends no matter how hard he tried. He frequently
tangled with the law as a juvenile, and he ended up with the wrong crowd and went to prison at 18
for a murder he might not have committed.

At each crisis point, Joe fell through gaping holes in the state's safety net. Now, as the state
cuts budgets even more, mental-health advocates wonder how many more Joes will fall through the
ever-widening holes.

Budget cuts hit home

The state cut funding for county mental-health agencies by $36 million in recent months. It
closed psychiatric hospitals in Cambridge and Dayton last year.

An estimated 2 million of Ohio's 11 million residents suffer from some form of mental illness;
only one-third of affected adults receive treatment.

Because of a 12 percent cutback in staffing -- 3,200 workers -- an estimated 30,000 fewer
Ohioans are expected to be treated by county mental-health agencies this year. The wait for help
can be up to three months, except in the most severe cases. Children with mental illness must wait
far longer.

The future is bleak. The Ohio Department of Mental Health, already reeling from three rounds of
recent budget cuts, would see a slight funding increase in the two-year state budget proposed by
Gov. Ted Strickland. But it would still be $36 million short of 2008 funding.

Terry Russell, former head of the National Alliance on Mental Illness/Ohio, said Joe's story is
all too common.

The state's grand deinstitutionalization plan of the 1980s emptied mental hospitals in favor of
community treatment centers and group homes. But community treatment has never met demand.

"These people were let out in the streets without that community support, absolutely knowing
they're going to be failures," Russell said. "Any time we don't find appropriate support services,
they're out on the street, or in a flophouse, and they end up going to jail or prison.

"It's getting worse every day. As ashamed as we are that we warehoused people in the 1970s, we
will look back at the '80s and '90s and think the same thing about how we've used prisons for the
mentally ill."

Ohio Mental Health Director Sandra Stephenson said that "even in the best of times, we lose
people" with severe mental illnesses who fall through the cracks. And these aren't the best of
times, she acknowledged.

"The pressure is on all of us to come together and focus on how we do the best we can for the
neediest people."

A troubled childhood

Joe weighed a healthy 10 pounds when he was born May 13, 1962, Mother's Day.

At first, his parents thought Joe was "all boy a child that kept you running," said his mother.
But when Joe's preschool kicked him out for bad behavior at age 4, his parents knew something was
wrong.

Trouble was Joe's constant companion when he enrolled in Vandalia public schools. To keep her
son in line, Mrs. Hutchison spent part of most days in his classroom.

But the traditional school system had no place for someone like Joe.

His parents eventually placed him in a Dayton-area school for neurologically handicapped
children.

Junior high school was worse. He desperately wanted to fit in, but his mental illness made him
more impulsive. He pushed a Dumpster into a ravine because he "wanted to see how many times it
would bounce" and smashed windows because he wanted to hear glass shatter.

Dr. Steven Jewell, a child and adolescent psychiatrist from Akron, said that Joe could have had
undiagnosed bipolar disorder as a child. Psychiatrists didn't label it as a specific mental illness
until a decade after his 1960s childhood.

Jewell said bipolar disorder is characterized by dramatic mood swings, episodes of deep
depression followed by periods of extreme elation. It can be effectively treated with a variety of
new medications.

Authorities sent Joe to youth-detention centers, foster homes and the Good Samaritan Hospital
mental-health center in Dayton.

But Joe's bad behavior became worse, fueled by alcohol, marijuana, glue fumes and other drugs he
used to escape the thoughts racing in his head.

The Ohio Youth Commission, which had Joe under supervision on two occasions, decided when he was
17 that he should go home. His parents resisted, feeling they could no longer handle their
increasingly erratic son.

"He's sick. Can't you find a place for him?" Mrs. Hutchison pleaded.

Again, the answer was no; there was no place for a chronically troubled person like Joe in the
youth system.

Robbery becomes murder

The youth commission eventually placed Joe at the Dayton YMCA, a mammoth old brownstone. Over
the next two weeks in the spring of 1980, Joe made friends with troubled kids who robbed houses and
stores for money to get high.

On March 30, 1980, Joe and two youths, 16 and 15, invaded the home of Richard and Evalyn Kaiser
in Kettering, a Dayton suburb. It was supposed to be a robbery but turned into murder when someone
in the group beat Mrs. Kaiser to death with a croquet mallet.

No physical evidence pointed to Joe, and testimony indicated another juvenile probably struck
the fatal blows. But prosecutors tried Joe, nearly 18, as an adult and used his juvenile record to
characterize him as the ringleader. The jury found Joe guilty of aggravated murder and felonious
assault, and he was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

Years later, for an English class assignment at Columbus State Community College, Joe wrote an
essay describing his feelings on the way to prison when he heard
Take the Long Way Home by Supertramp on the radio.

Joe wrote that the words "rattle through my brain like pocket change that finds its way into the
dryer."

But they comforted him, too.

"It will be a really unimaginable amount of time, but I'm just taking the long way home," he
wrote.

After years of pleas from family and friends, the Ohio Parole Board said it "became aware of the
co-defendants being more culpable of the offense than previously indicated."

The board released Joe on July 19, 2003, after he had served 23 years, 100 days.

A diagnosis at last

On March 2, 2005, officials at the Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare state hospital told Joe
that he had bipolar disorder. For the first time, Joe had a specific diagnosis. He was 43.

It was a relief for Mrs. Hutchison -- a validation of what she had believed, that her son had
been mentally ill since childhood.

Joe enrolled at Columbus State, where for once he seemed to feel at home, making the dean's list
and earning an associate degree in the summer of 2007.

By the end of the year, however, Joe's life began spinning out of control again. Unknown to his
mother, he had gone off his medications. He spent Christmas in jail after being picked up drunk and
disoriented.

Officials at Twin Valley, where his bipolar disorder had been diagnosed two years earlier, said
they saw no sign of it. They would not hospitalize him.

His counselors urged him to drop out of school, the only place where he'd really succeeded, get
a job and move out on his own. He became more despondent, huffing the solvent toluene to escape his
pain.

Joe decided to drop out. There was no place for someone like him in an Ohio college.

The final days

When Vicki Summerfield met Joe in the spring of 2007, she admits she was a little scared of the
bald ex-prisoner with Coke-bottle glasses and few social graces. He came to her house with her
brother, also an ex-prisoner.

But over the next few months, they became close friends.

"He was brilliant," Summerfield said. "He was special. He had been treated so bad all his life.
He was so innocent, so good in a childlike way."

But Summerfield saw Joe slowly falling apart in the year after they met, paralyzed by the fear
of returning to prison.

"He was terrified. He couldn't get the help he needed. He told me, 'I can't hardly control my
mind sometimes.' "

On Jan. 16, 2008, Mrs. Hutchison left her 45-year-old son at home in southwestern Columbus. He
told her he was planning to run an errand and then paint his bedroom. She kissed him on the top of
the head.

No one knows what he was thinking when he left home, got some alcohol, crashed into two cars,
abandoned his car and ran into traffic on a busy highway.

But Summerfield has an idea.

About an hour before he died, Joe called Summerfield's cell phone and left her an encouraging
message because she was having family troubles.

"Everything looks dark now, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, my little Tweety Bird,"
he said, using his pet name for Summerfield.

"Joe wasn't trying to kill himself," she said firmly. "I believe with all my heart Joe panicked
when he went down the wrong ramp. Nothing could stop him. He was so scared that he jumped into
traffic."

Her son's death left Mrs. Hutchison searching for answers, absolution, meaning and solace.

"I would like my son's life validated. He wasn't a bad person, a bad man. The life he lived, he
had no control over."

Her faith helped her reach one conclusion.

"I believe Joe was here for a reason," she said. "Joe was a test for humanity."